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posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 18 2016, @07:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the dunno,-change-channel dept.

The Guardian asks: Is the golden age of television over?

Money is the root of TV's problems. In the US, where the TV economy is headquartered, TV and internet access costs two to three times what it does in the UK, and networks are in a tug-of-war with Americans, who are increasingly shredding steep cable bills in favor of Netflix and streaming services. This summer, many networks became locked in all-out legal battles with cash-strapped cable companies, with multibillion-dollar distribution deals at stake to fund those networks' huge programming budgets.

Executives are planning for a less luxurious future, in which TV shows may be briefer, lower-budget and filled with the kind of product-placement ads that audiences hate and advertisers pay for. Worse still, the company that started much of the trouble may soon confront flaws in its own business model.

Netflix reports earnings on Monday. Its problems, and those of companies like it, are more pressing than those of traditional television. At a conference in New York this month, chief executive Reed Hastings was blunt.

"Disney, who is very good in China, had their movie service shut down," he told an audience at the New Yorker Tech Fest. "Apple, who is very good in China, had their movie service closed down. It doesn't look good."

Hastings said his company was seeking to expand in other countries, India in particular. But there's a reason media businesses seeking vast scale tend to view China as the solution to all their problems: internet penetration in India is rising from 26% according to the World Bank. In China, it's rising from 50%.

[Continues...]

Netflix needs the money that increased scale would provide, in part, to pay top dollar for shows such as Arrested Development and Lost. In January, it told investors it owed $10.9bn in TV show licenses alone, with $4.7bn of that due this year. After that, almost the entire balance is due before the end of 2018.

Netflix will have to keep buying reruns at what will almost certainly be increasing rates if it wants to retain its users, and the companies selling those shows are now in a tight spot too – largely thanks to the ad-free Netflix model.

At US television networks, budget struggles mean making shows more as UK networks do, except with lots of ads and product placement: shorter lifespans, fewer sets and special effects, fewer episodes per series – and then little margin for error if shows look like they're failing early on.

Netflix cannot scale back. Its viewers pay for it outright and express their displeasure by canceling subscriptions, not by changing the channel. If anything, its executives are spending more: Baz Luhrmann's 1970s New York period piece, The Get Down, came with a record price tag for a service that had already driven up the cost of new scripts: $120m for 12 episodes, according to Variety.

In short, television content is expensive. With fewer people watching, the advertisers are getting fed up with paying the premiums the television networks ask for, and people aren't willing to pay the real price required for good television content. Unless something changes soon, expect cheaper television shows with shorter seasons and lots of product placements within the shows.


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  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:44AM

    by theluggage (1797) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:44AM (#415611)

    Me personally, I am happy to watch more of the "low budget" stuff. Things with a crazy good script, great unknown actors, and reasonable production values.

    ...that seems to describe the Netfilx/Marvel productions like Jessica Jones/Daredevil to a tee: they're certainly not cheaply made, but they're not FX-fests either - being mainly drama-led with a minimum of stunt shots and fights. Probably a good way to get the superhero movie audience without the superhero movie price tag.

    Also, I think 10-13 eps per season is an improvement, especially in shows that do a "season arc" - 20+ episodes is too long to stretch out most stories and you end up with something like Battlestar Galactica, with a handful of decent episodes at the beginning and end of each season and a lot of tedious padding in between.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:58AM (#415614)

    I remember when a season of television was 24 hours long. Today you're lucky to get half that. Now if you want to binge watch for 24 hours straight you end up watching two or three seasons, and you don't even have tedious padding episodes to provide pacing and comic relief. Producers are just getting lazy and greedy.

    • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday October 18 2016, @12:09PM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @12:09PM (#415628) Homepage

      Quality, not quantity.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 18 2016, @06:30PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @06:30PM (#415782)

      Now if you want to binge watch for 24 hours straight

      Do people actually do this? After the third or fourth straight hour of the same show, I'd be missing a lot of the more subtle bits. I guess if you're binge-watching Futurama or something where there's no real continuity, sure...

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:42PM

        by t-3 (4907) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:42PM (#415917)

        Really? I'm the opposite, when I have time in between I forgot everything and don't know what's going on, but when I binge-watch I catch foreshadowing and subtle things more often. It certainly makes series much worse to binge watch them for me, because everything seems so ham-fisted and telegraphed in 95% of stuff. I hate it when I can accurately see what's going to happen 10 episodes beforehand.

        • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday October 19 2016, @01:52PM

          by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @01:52PM (#416129)

          Suppose it depends on context. If it was a really complicated show I can see the value of "keeping in RAM" the complicated plot points when you binge.

          I just in general don't really watch any super complicated shows ;-)

          --
          "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"